Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Pournelle
Jerry Eugene Pournelleis an American science fiction writer, essayist and journalist who contributed for many years to the computer magazine Byte. Pournelle served as President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1973...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 August 1933
CountryUnited States of America
years people fundamentals
It's not only possible, but likely that the Nobel Prize in economics will go in alternate years to people who disagree on nearly everything fundamental.
dark age definitions
The definition of a Dark Age is that we no longer remember what we once could do.
political desire politics
Unrestricted laissez faire capitalism allocates resources in a most efficient way to satisfy human wants without regard to the rationality or morality of those desires.
cost
Everything takes longer and costs more.
government long people
It's the nature of government, to build enduring institutions, structures that stay long after their purpose is over. If you pay people to help the poor, you have people who won't be paid if there aren't any poor, so they'll be sure to find some.
team able location
I've noticed that just about every time I find a large program with known glitches that no one seems able to fix, that program is written in C and is likely written by a programming team in a remote location.
high-prices
Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.
literature stuff reason
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
arrogant messages firsts
Microsoft has gotten so big that it can put out a Preview that will install itself without checking first to see if it has expired. The message here is that Microsoft's time is worth more than yours.... no start-up company could get away with being that arrogant.
want action ethical
In any ethical situation, the thing you want least to do is probably the right action.
faces politics poor
Grinding the faces of the poor seems to be the policy of the Greens.
world information
I have more information in one place than anybody in the world.
epic knowing way
You no longer have much in the way of knowing what to do in a big, epic novel about the future, because nobody knows what the hell is going to happen.
american-journalist fantasy hard science
We do a hard fantasy as well as hard science fiction, and I think I probably single-handedly recreated military science fiction. It was dead before I started working in it.